I spoke with a couple who have children and have rather extensive “legacy plans” that they put into place around the time their children were born. They enlisted the services of a lawyer who helped them compile the following documents.

1. Will 2. Living Will 3. Healthcare Proxy 4. Power of Attorney

During the interview, the husband was much more well versed than his wife in what documents they had created with their lawyer several years back. During the interview, the husband educated his wife and reviewed the details of their plans. (This was interesting and affirmed that our tool helps with starting the conversation)

During the interview, after establishing an understanding of their current legacy planning, I gave them a tour of our system, explaining the features we were considering. They were a little skeptical that our tool would benefit them and explained that they have a copy of their documents as do their lawyers. They mentioned that they even have a agendum to their will that gets down the item level details. (affirmation that this is an important feature that must include)

In response, I told them that our service would serve as a safe repository for the documents they had created with their lawyer. They agreed that this would be valuable and when I showed them our site, I lost credibility because we did not have a place for them to store the exact documents they already have. Our site did not demonstrate sufficient domain expertise because we did not reference their current understanding of legacy planning.

We should probably include our basic checklist feature that we spoke about earlier in the semester.

We’ve spent some time trawling through cofounder matching sites, including founderdating.com and techcofounder.com. We’ll be able to put up a working product ourselves, but not with the degree of professionalism we would ultimately like, and probably not with the scalability we hope we will need!

I spoke with JD last weekend, as he responded positively to the description of our idea when I contact him. We spoke about the idea in general, and of course, he had a personal story that made the idea even more compelling to him. He had thoughts about digital assets as well, and some good feedback on our we might reach people.

He is not currently in a position to work full time with us, but offered some advice on scaling and security, both of which were important pointers. Specific to scaling, he understood the idea and what it would need, so that is helping us this week to validate our cost model. Specifically, he had the insight to understand that this is not a site that subscribers are going to come visit on a daily basis – the value is in the stored plan and notification preferences. As such, he thought that we could probably support up to a million accounts and probably not go above a single server….So, taking that with a grain of salt, we’re doing to 10x that for our cost/scale estimates. JD knows something about this – he’s currently working for a well-known site that handles video management for videos that twitter users post.

I followed up with my first round of earlyvangelists from week 2 with a survey focusing on whether our mockup website looked professional, trustworthy, and whether it conveys the message we’re trying to send or not. We also asked them whether they thought the institutions we’ve shown as ‘partners’ or ‘trusted’ partners at the bottom of the site sent the right or the wrong message…Part of our hypothesis is that the reason these amazing institutions haven’t been able to do more around end-of-life education planning is that they are too……institutional.

All of the respondents said that the institutions cited added credibility to the site, and one emphasized that he wouldn’t spend any time or money on the site until he had researched it thoroughly and validated it’s credibility through alternative sources. All respondents also said the site looked very professional – some suggested making the look/feel a bit more serious – I think there were too many happy smiling people in the photos that headline the site. They also all said that it properly conveyed the message we had articulated in interviews previously.

Lastly, those who said they would pay something preferred the one-time option, and one suggested $50 one-time, and another said $399 sounded reasonable. Good feedback!

I stopped by the Ashby Care Center to talk to some nurses and a social worker about our product. I showed Monica (social worker) and Debra (nurse practitioner) some screen shoots of our website. After I explain to them our revenue model where it’s free to use and they would only pay for creating triggers and legal documents, they were both very excited and wanted to try the product right away. I told them that it would be about 2 more weeks until we can get the site properly running.

After our conversation, I collected their email addresses and asked them to be beta testers for the site.

The photos are images of the basement floor of the facility. Debra painted the walls herself because she wanted to give the patients and worker the feeling that were going on a trip.

Stan is a family friend who is retired, and who worked for many years at a well-known brokerage house at the top of the world trade center – he was already retired on 9/11. In the past 10 years, he’s recovered from a heart attack, as well as an almost-fatal kidney infection. He immediately understood the importance of what we were working on, and the need for people to plan ahead of time – he’s married, and has two adult children.

He’s also a marketing professor at a local community college, and had a full barrage of questions that only a business school professor could have. He identified many of the issues we’ve been addressing, but also some that we haven’t (at least, fully). We’ll get to them, and get back to him when we have more to show him.

Marilyn is an artist and administrative assistant in her 60’s that lives in NYC. She loved the idea of capturing a complete end-of-life plan online, and thought it solved a real problem. She thought the service should charge something even for simple sharing – the $45 annual fee sounded reasonable to her. She would pay it. We talked at length about the importance of an advance directive, and she had some stories from her own family that drove the point home. She also thought of the idea we’ve discussed of cataloguing your belongings to gift to others, and suggested that as a feature.

She has a close friend who is a breast cancer researcher, and is going to discuss the idea with her and see if she’s interested in talking to us.